Takashi Miike of Japan is one of the world’s busiest filmmakers, turning out an exhausting five or six movies a year.

He also is one of the most notorious, dealing with normally forbidden subjects such as bestiality, necrophilia, sadomasochism and incest.

His blood-soaked, ultra-violent works have won him a devoted cult following.

Miike, who turns 42 on Aug. 24, received his big break when he was “discovered” in 1999 at the Rotterdam Film Festival in the Netherlands.

As a result, two of his flicks, “Dead or Alive” and “Audition,” received theatrical runs in New York.

Now Anthology Film Archives is hosting the three-film series “Miike Mania!”

Running now through Aug. 22, it consists of “Audition” (1999), considered by many critics to be his best work yet, and two New York premieres: “The Happiness of the Katakuris” (2002) and “The City of Lost Souls” (2000).

The first half of “Audition” is deceiving. It plays as the tender story of a lonely, middle-aged widower seeking a new wife.

The film makes a 360-degree turn when the man (the father of a teenage son) falls for a seemingly docile 24-year-old former dancer.

She turns out to be anything but docile. So hang on to your seats!

Or as Miike told an audience before a screening in Rotterdam: “Though some of you will get sick during the last half, I hope you all will stick with it through the end.”

“Happiness” is a musical comedy – yes, a musical comedy – about a family that opens a guest house in the shadow of Mt. Fuji.

They don’t have many customers, and those who do check in quickly turn up dead.

We have yet to see “Lost Souls,” but production notes call it a “punk ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ with an opening that feels like a Sergio Leone spaghetti western set at the end of the world.” Wow!

In an interview in January, we asked Miike about the extreme violence in some Japanese movies.

“If you watch certain Japanese movies, you have the impression that they are more violent than Western movies. But I don’t think they are that extreme as far as violence goes,” he told us.

“What bothers me about certain Hollywood movies is that just to glorify the hero, they allow him to shoot hundreds of innocent people of certain other nationalities to show that they have no human purpose at all.

“That I find really extreme.”

Anthology Film Archives, Second Avenue and Second Street, East Village; (212) 505-5181.